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January 14, 2004
Pay Tuition, Download Music
Posted by Arnold
A new business model.
As spring semester classes got under way Monday at Penn State, more than 2,600 students had registered for the Napster 2.0 service, which comes free with their tuition. All 17,000 on-campus resident students are eligible to use it.
Instead of relying on DRM crippleware, the concept is to change the business model for downloads. What a novel idea. Must be very confusing to the RIAA.
Thanks to Lawrence Lee for the pointer.
Comments (1)
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1. Brad Hutchings on January 14, 2004 12:19 PM writes...
What's so new about this business model? It boils down to assessing a student fee for something that not all the students want or can utilize. Maybe the University of California campuses just pioneered this practice 15 years ago. Then at the Irvine campus, we paid earmarked fees for sports arena ($40/quarter), grad students were mandated into a lousy health insurance program (unless you documented other coverage), another earmarked fee for a student center w/food court. This was a >50% commuter campus.
There is a already news of students at PSU who are irritated that their tech fees have gone to socialized music. I din't know what the commuter and off-campus population is like at Penn State, but I imagine those students aren't happy to be subsidizing the dorm dwellers.
-Brad
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